Has My Christmas Past Played A Part In Your Holiday?
I wasn’t ‘slow as molasses’ when I was a kid. I was ‘slow as cold molasses.’ When your teacher tells you that, and your mother laughs when you ask what it means, being six years old feels like a joke only a grownup would get.
Of course, one embarrassment alone does not a pattern make. There were more clues to my age being seen as a joke. This true tale doesn’t list them all, but it does revolve around the biggest clue to what my mother and that guy, Santa Claus, thought about little kids. I’m pretty sure that what happened to me on my sixth Christmas, contributed to the man in the red suit becoming an even nicer guy than he was before he misread my letter.
(First, let me say that moving slow can also be interpreted as contemplative. That’s my bit to help any of the deep thinkers who may be running around in your life.)
Now back to me at age six: I thought hard about that year’s list for Santa. A cuddly something or other was on there, because I was that type of girl. But mostly my mind was on music.
Mom played records, vinyl, when she did chores like laundry or worked on Sunday dinner. On weekends, a couple times a month, she brought out her boxy, weighty, probably pre-marriage, fifties…
